Overview

Disavowing Disability examines the role that disability, both as a concept and an experience, played in seventeenth-century debates about salvation and religious practice. Exploring how the use and definition of the term 'disability' functioned to allocate agency and culpability, this study argues that the post-Restoration imperative to capacitate 'all men'—not just the 'elect'—entailed a conceptual circumscription of disability, one premised on a normative imputation of capability. The work of Richard Baxter, sometimes considered a harbinger of 'modernity' and one of the most influential divines of the Long Eighteenth Century, elucidates this multifarious process of enabling. In constructing an ideology of ability that imposed moral self-determination, Baxter encountered a germinal form of the 'problem' of disability in liberal theory. While a strategy of 'inclusionism' served to assimilate most manifestations of alterity, melancholy presented an intractability that frustrated the logic of rehabilitation in fatal ways. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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9781108823128

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'a fresh, engaging, and exciting work that breaks new ground at an important intersection between disability and religion, a volume that will be required reading for scholars in these fields.' Maura Brady, Reformation 'The significance of this book lies in its seemingly effortless but deeply rigorous interdisciplinarity and lightly worn erudition ... The virtue of McKendry's account is its astute combination of the tools of theology with literary criticism and disability studies ... It illuminates the contours of Baxter's enormous theological project in connection with his life (and how he narrates it) and demonstrates in a fresh and generative way how Baxter acted as a key mediator and innovator of theological models that continue to shape ableist assumptions of the individual subject within secular, liberal theories of the self.' Alison Searle, Church History and Religious Culture

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